Off the streets and onto the web

WHEN 200 people gathered briefly last June to see a nondescript rug in Macy's New York City department store, "flashmobbing" entered the lexicon. The surreal idea behind it is to bring a large number of people together at a given place and time, for no particular purpose except to confuse those not in the know. The power of the internet has never been so pointlessly, and entertainingly, demonstrated.

Flashmobbing is the by-product of a much more powerful phenomenon: the culture of grass-roots activism that uses websites, emailing lists and chat rooms to rally support and organise protests. Take the StopEsso/StopExxonMobil movement. On the back of a well-organised distribution of information on the web, it has become a global environmental campaign against the policies of the oil giant ExxonMobil. The huge anti-globalisation demonstrations at meetings of the World Trade Organization are also organised largely through the internet.

Now larger, mainstream organisations ...

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